3. Subscribe to a lot of email newsletters.

If you want to send great emails, it’s a good idea to subscribe to tons of newsletters to 1) build up your swipe file and 2) see which tactics work and which really stink.

We created a list of 50 great email newsletters here but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t hold back … signup for tons of newsletters but filter them into an archive for easy reference and minimal inbox disruption.

4. Signup for lots of products in your industry.

Keep track of your competitors by subscribing to their emails and signing up for their product or service. Make sure you are receiving their newsletters and promotional email as well as their onboarding and lifecycle email.

It’s a good idea to make a “Competitors” folder in Feedly to keep track of their blogs and monitor Product Hunt for newbies in your field.

6. Write the world’s best welcome email.

Imagine that NASA is sending a rocket to the moon. If the rocket is one degree off at launch, it’s going to miss the moon by a zillion miles. Their aim better be really good. (I’m no scientist but you get my point.)

Your welcome email is the same way. Make it damn good so you end up on the moon and not Mars.

7. Don’t be distracted by A/B testing.

If you were building a house, would you worry about what color to paint the bathroom before digging the foundation?

That’s what you’re doing if you’re A/B testing subject lines and button copy before building complete onboarding and lifecycle campaigns. Getting those in place is paramount to using email successfully.

9. Send plain-text emails.

The best way to market online is to teach, to regularly deliver valuable content to your audience so that they will trust you and eventually want to purchase from you. So when you send an email, what part of the communication delivers the most value?

That’s right, the content. So we should be stripping away everything else that isn’t necessary in order to focus on the content. Multi-column layouts, background images, logos, and all the other nonsense that typically fills marketing emails doesn’t deliver value to the recipient. Instead it is all about you, the sender. Flip that around and start delivering value.

10. Build a foundation of lifecycle emails.

One of the many issues with promotional emails and newsletters is that you can only use them once.

Lifecycle emails, on the other hand, are used over and over again. This is awesome because you can do the work once and get value from it for a long time and you can actually optimize it since it will be triggered again soon.

14. Hack your personal emails.

15. Go all-in on H2H.

Speaking of Greg Ciotti, he has mastered the “human-to-human” writing tone.

Write emails like you are speaking to one person. Forget B2B and B2C. Focus on H2H.

When I get emails from Greg, I don’t differentiate between personal and professional correspondence. Whether he sent the email just to me or to Help Scout’s 60,000 subscribers, it feels the same because he uses a conversational tone.

Every email you send is personal. And every email you send is marketing.

16. Read your emails out loud.

Baremetrics founder Josh Pigford recently started turning his blog posts into a podcast called Founder’s Journey simply by reading them out loud.

This is incredibly smart because it’s an easy way to repurpose content but it’s also a great way to hone your writing. After seeing this, I started reading my emails and blog posts out loud before publishing them.

It gives you a whole new perspective on how your writing is actually received. (Thanks for the inspiration Josh.)

17. Treat onboarding like a newborn baby.

Most parents don’t leave their newborn babies outside overnight to toughen them up. Instead, they cater to their every need – feeding them at all hours of the day and night, changing their diapers and taking lots of pictures to remember those special moments.

19. Use the 1-2-3 Method.

When email fails, it’s often because the sender didn’t make it abundantly clear what the recipient should do next. The 1-2-3 Method (explained in greater detail here) ensures that will never happen again.

20. Use the Inverted Pyramid Method.

The Inverted Pyramid Method is a good way to ensure that your emails aren’t distracting.

If you find yourself in a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation, help stakeholders focus on the purpose of email marketing. Design, copy and content can actually interfere with email marketing! Use this guide minimize distractions and send tight, focused emails.

22. Create a personal newsletter.

I did this recently as an experiment and am already learning some important lessons. (You can subscribe here: SwipeFile.co.)

For example, when you aren’t the founder of a business, you can sometimes hide behind a veil of anonymity. Maybe you create emails that are “sent” from your CEO or maybe you create emails that are just “from” the company.

When the email is yours and yours alone, you pore over every word in hopes of perfecting your email. Ownership of an email will help you learn to write like a human and send way better emails at your day job.

Check out Goodbits, Curated and TinyLetter to see how easy curation can be. Additionally, you can create a second project in Vero to keep professional and personal email separate.

How to Send Better Email

Subscribe for updates

Join the more than 10,000 product, engineering and marketing team members who enjoy content from our blog on a regular basis.

Jaina

Great list, especially signing up for email newsletters not in your industry. It opens you up to so many more ideas and inspiration that people within your industry may not be doing. And you want to push forward and beyond, right? Good stuff, Jimmy!

Harish Sharma

Oh My Gosh! That’s really a wonderful and informative article. I do follow few points but not all however from now onwards I will try to keep all these points in mind. THANKS A TON for this great post.

Just trying to get some help on a dropped email.. The support staff are taking weeks and weeks to get back to me on a missing email. Is there a different channel to get help that isn’t presented on the site?